Review: Kevin Costner’s Horizon falls short of the Great Western

ANDWhenever a filmmaker or showrunner takes a chance on a big Western, a million journalists and critics start typing about how “The Western is back!” or “The Western never went away!” or “The Western is the genre we need right now!” or even just – in connection with the enormous popularity of Yellow stone– “Finally the ‘older’ audience gets the western they want and deserve!” It will be easy for these writers to apply most, if not all, of these truisms to Kevin Costner’s work. Horizon: An American saga, an ambitious four-part epic about white people advancing west – and, without any moral qualms, taking for themselves lands that have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years. The first three-hour chunk of Horizonconveniently called Chapter 1, premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday night, attended by its creator, star and chief risk-taker, Kevin Costner. The film – and let’s call it a film, although it appears to have been structured to be suitable for smaller, television episode-sized episodes – performed well with an international audience, and Costner was visibly moved by their enthusiastic and affectionate response. .

Only a truly rude person would want to deny Costner this moment of glory: he’s nursed this idea for over 30 years and spent around $20 million of his own money just to make it work. (Chapter 1 will open in North American theaters on June 28th, with Chapter 2 next in August. There are no release dates for the remaining two chapters.) Costner wasn’t always the best actor, but he was always a handsome, attractive figure, the kind of performer who gives the impression of handling stardom with an easy shrug. And in recent years, his performances have become more energized – his silver fox earnestness has a bit of bite. (He was great in the 2020 western thriller Let him goas a retired sheriff who sets out to rescue his young grandson from a frightening and backward clan.) As Hayes Ellison in Chapter 1 in Horizon, he is less a star than an anchoring presence. When he finally enters the film about an hour later – and after a prolonged, deadly battle between Apaches and white settlers – you feel like the film might begin in earnest. Hayes is laconic and cautious; he suffered in life, although we still don’t know how. His outfits also have the best color scheme, consisting mostly of soft smoky blues, and he gets the best bandana: while the other guys wear rough cotton things tied together anyway, Hayes’ scarf is flexible, delicately patterned, artfully draped. .someone Gotta bring a little sprezzatura to the border.

But most of all, Horizon comes trotting towards us a little also gently. Westerns don’t need a special reason to exist, at least if you ask me: the genre is as robust and rich as the action film, the romantic comedy, the crime thriller. There is a lot that a creative and dedicated filmmaker can do with just the classical structure. But Horizon– although it is at least a little culturally sensitive, beautiful to look at and reasonably engaging – yet it feels curiously indistinct. It is so elegant, so careful, so anxious not to upset or offend, that it reflects little sense of risk. Horizon: Chapter 1 feels deeply conservative in a cultural sense; it has no reason to exist other than to remind us how great the great Westerns are, without (so far, at least) actually being great.

This is ironic considering how high the stakes are for Costner, and you can’t look at Horizon and deduce that he doesn’t care. In fact, he cares too much. He and co-writer Jon Baird have created a complicated plot full of characters who flail around, sometimes doing little more than taking up space. Part of the action takes place in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley, where a group of settlers have staked their future on a new town called Horizon. Every now and then it shifts to the Montana Territory, where a separate group of pioneers traverses the landscape in their covered wagons, carefully conserving their supply of fresh water, a precious resource.

In Horizon City, some unstable structures were erected; the inhabitants have gathered at one of them for a dance, where we first see young matriarch Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller, giving the film’s best and most credible performance) encouraging her young teenage son Nate (Hayes Costner, Kevin’s son) to dance with her. He refuses, and she gently criticizes him for being embarrassed to go for a walk with his mother. But the little family has barely reached their home when a group of angry Native Americans launches an attack. Frances and her teenage daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail) survive, but are among the lucky few. The United States Cavalry eventually arrives to help pick up the pieces; one of his numbers is a soulful young first lieutenant played by Sam Worthington. He passes his officer’s coat to Frances, who, as strong as she is, is also obviously torn by grief. If you see the beginnings of a future romance, you won’t be wrong.

Elsewhere, in the Montana Territory, a character played by Jena Malone (we later learn that her name is Ellen) shoots a guy and runs off with a baby, the kind of event that causes legions of annotating critics to scribble things down. like “take baby, why? in your notebooks. Why indeed? Turns out a lot of other people want that baby too, including Dale Dickey’s rude Mrs. Sykes and her scruffy kids (played by Jamie Campbell Bower and Job Beavers). Other characters and plot points pile up quickly: Sassy businessman Marigold (Abbey Lee) takes care of Ellen’s stolen baby during the day (he’s almost a toddler now) and entertains visiting men in the bedroom at night. When she sees Costner’s Hayes walking in, her eyes widen in appreciation. At some point, there will be a tender and tasty dry humping.

Unsurprisingly, considering Costner was also the writer-director-star of Dances with Wolveswhich attempted to correct decades of harmful depictions of Native Americans, Horizon is resolute in the way he treats the “Beautiful land, I think we will conquer it!” property acquisition school. The natives’ dilemma – they would rather not fight the whites if they could, but how else could they keep their tribal lands? – is largely represented by the actions of two Apache brothers, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) and Taklishim. (Tatanka Means), who feel that violence is their only recourse to defend their home and people. Still, none of the native characters are as developed as they could be. Will their stories emerge in the next episodes? For now, we have to give Costner the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, in the name of sensitivity, Horizon gets twisted into some historically inaccurate pretzel shapes: Worthingon’s first lieutenant, Trent Gephardt, a guy who sees exactly what’s going on and knows why it’s wrong, repeatedly refers to the natives as “the Indians.” That’s a word that very few of America’s white ancestors would have used; Many things could have been different if they had happened.

But then, Horizon is striving for many things, including visual majesty, dramatic emotion, some sense of atonement for injustices that are essentially unforgivable. But mostly, he’s a westerner with a passion for westerns. John Debney’s score aims for pure Elmer Bernstein-esque grandeur – but it also feels like a facsimile, a copy of a copy that has lost some of its sharpness. And while this attack on the Kittredges’ property is beautifully blocked and shot, as well as harrowing, it still frames the Apaches as faceless, ruthless invaders. Costner, it seems, wants to have it both ways: help us understand why native populations would be forced to defend their lands, even as he essentially presents them as “the other.” His narrative is lacking a few moments here.

And there is another overarching problem. Horizon it doesn’t come close to the relentless emotional toughness of many 1950s Westerns by the likes of John Ford, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher, or, for that matter, the later works of their Italian spiritual brothers, the duo of Sergios Leone and Corbucci. The greatest Westerns of the 1950s were brazen in addressing the feelings of helplessness that can plague the most ultra-masculine of men. And these directors knew a lot about toxic masculinity long before the term was even coined. In Anthony Mann’s great 1958 western Man of the West, a saloon singer played by Julie London is raped and beaten by thugs – the events are not depicted, but Mann makes us feel the horror of them nonetheless. The woman’s suffering is not just a dramatic device; is a source of anguish for the film’s hero, played by Gary Cooper, and for Mann himself.

Horizon It’s just getting started, but you can’t imagine Costner daring to enter territory like this – complex human territory, as opposed to just gender territory. Perhaps he will go further in subsequent chapters. But for now, he’s just paying a respectful tribute. No matter how beautiful he looks while doing this, it’s still not enough.